Blessed

Okay, so the title's a bit cheesy.

But I like cheese.

Especially colby-jack, swiss, pepperjack, and sometimes a good cheddar.

I would consider those blessings.

Yesterday kinda dwarfed those two. Last week brought no letter from Marissa and a crushing crush; this week brought two letters from that magnificent young lady and a Pell grant.

That's right, I heard from a young lady I am quite fond of, and school is paid for.

Two of the largest areas of any import in my life, awash in happy all in one day.

(I might even be able to afford a carriage before all is said and done.)

:D

D'ni Goggles

I realized the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written. (IMDB Wiki)

So begins one's journey on the island of Myst.

I once found a series that provided backstory for the game. It was fascinating, from Catherine's playful torus of a world to the language of worlds, phrases for weather, ink etching itself into a page, to Ghen's dark insanity and Atrus' grasp on the edge of reality.

The ability to reach beyond one's world and speak into existence immeasurable wonders possesses an allure that I am drawn to. (Computers are a facet of this phenomenon.)

So it is with the main character's glasses. Throughout the book, the lenses that he and his father wear are adjusted for magnification and attenuation. Aside from some abstruse considerations (polarization), this is about all that is feasible without a power source and some basic quantum mechanics.

Still, fascinating--a set of goggles, perhaps somewhat less cumbersome than modern night vision goggles. A complex optical chamber with switchable lenses, controlled by sliding rings along the outside--two or three rings for various magnifications telescopic and macro, all designed to work with one other ring for focus, and one combination for 'real' sight. A series of rings with various light filters, from color notch filters to downconverting UV lenses to mere sunglasses. Perhaps a set for looking at the sun and welding. :)

Think--the wearer would be imbued with the ability to see the world around you in whatever way they could imagine, drawing conclusions, seeing patterns, playing with the world around them in a whole new way.

Totally worth the 2-3 pounds of brass and glass required on your face...

Getting Kinected

Yes, the pun...is horrid.

So today I finally decided to hook my Kinect up to my computer.

It's pretty cool.

I can get a rough depth map of the room, 640x480 webcam imagery, cool-looking near-IR imagery, and sound using it. I can also manually tilt it up and down and blink the LED.

How? I thought you'd ask.

LibFreenect is what I used. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. While this article provides a fairly good tutorial, it is a bit outdated. I followed his instructions roughly. His dependency list is fairly good, but I had to build and break it a couple times to find out which other packages I needed. Note that if it breaks on libxyz, you'll need libxyz-dev.

First, I cloned libfreenect's git repository. Entering that directory, one finds a nice cmake-based system that I don't understand at all.

Simply:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
As per the instructions linked above.

Now this is where his instructions are outdated:
cd bin
sudo ./glview
Tadaa! You should now be viewing the depth map and webcam input in a nice big little window. :)

Notice that after the program finishes initialization, it dumps usage information.
w = look up
s = center view
x = look down
f = change view modes (near-IR and two(?) webcam modes
LED controls:
0 = off
1 = green
2 = red
3 = amber
4,5(?) = green, steady blink
6 = red-amber alternating

I has toy. Is happy. Now, to get AJ's pet project working with it...'cuz a Gumstix Tobi with a Fire CoM would totally run it. :D

Parallax

He couldn't believe it.

He peered into the telescope once more. A mere four parsecs back, the one star had seemed like a supernova compared to the other, more distant star--and oh, had it been spectacular!

Now the other was just as brilliant.

Leaning back, he pondered. Magnitudes hadn't changed--the instrumentation assured him of that. The parallax and the higher quality optics he'd acquired at the last station seemed to have done it--strange, what a bit of perspective would do.

The topology of subspace meant that the more distant one was his current destination, while the other was squarely out of his way. In contrast, normal space observations led one's mind to a different, technically impossible conclusion.

Occasionally the Madness would set in. It was rare, but in those cases his astrogator's training would kick in and start trying to work around physics, only to be barely set right by Reason.

This time, though, Reason and the telescope agreed, at least enough to stave off the Madness. For now.

Still it crept about in his mind, occasionally reminding him. Of his humanity, of his destination, of the Could Be, of the Might Be.

The Madness was his friend--a fickle one, true--but for once, impossibly, incredibly, amazingly, it seemed to drive him forward, towards the long game...and it brought with it a sense of euphoria long-run pilots often forgot.

The one was so close now--but for once the final run home seemed bearable.

I'm sorry I was bossy. And monstrous.

So, a friend or two has seen a thing or two about me.

Sometimes I'm contradictory, inflammatory, and arrogant.

It hurts. Once I noticed this when a third-order verbal spat led to my friend digging in and twisting my arm into realizing that she was right and that I had started it. (No, really, I'm pretty sure I started it and she is right.) Not an hour later I slammed on the brakes and stopped from being quite the same butte to a roommate.

Curious, no? Not the first time, and, sadly methinks, not the last.

By the way, an SAT study card once informed me that "ameliorative" means, as Webster's assures me, to improve or make better. (I actually ran into this root in Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series with the Meliorare society that worked to improve humanity through genetic engineering.) Isn't Latin great?

Now, you'll probably not notice that I haven't told half the story. I've seen 'ameliorative' used as a technical term, right next to pejorative, imperfect, subjunctive, and other language-related jargon. So, with a bit of Googling (which failed miserably from my wee Android device; try 'ameliorative euphemism'), here is what I learned:

1) She was right:
Amelioration (euphemism): making something sound better than it is
(This reference is actually quite cool and points out that the use of jargon has social implications that had been pointed out to me by a friend but that I rarely cognize. One of these implications involves this 'linguistic' amelioration.)

2) Understanding this usage is hard.

#2 is something I have run into previously as well. If I don't immediately understand it, no matter how marvelous or wondrous it is or may be, I suffer from the tendency to reject, spurn, trivialize, or analogize it out of significance. (For those of you pondering using this last path, it doesn't work.)

Hmm.